Anne Frank Story Still Inspires

Children Find Inspiration In Struggles Of Anne Frank

Wwii: After 50 Years

July 06, 1992|By SHERI VENEMA; Courant Staff Writer

Dear Anne, I saw your house where the store was. I liked the bookcase. I saw pictures of you in the concentration camp. I liked the pictures of you when you were small. You were just an ordinary human being.

From letters to Anne Frank by Hartford-area schoolchildren who viewed a recent display on her life at the Connecticut Historical Society.

Amsterdam is usually cloudy, so Dutch homes have huge windows to capture as much light as the overcast sky will grant. Despite the gloomy skies, Amsterdammers are an outdoor people who revel in rare sunny days. On those days, the city seems to bloom. The sun bursts in through the huge windows, and people clog the brick streets along the city's ancient canals.

Fifty years ago today, Anne Frank, just turned 13, left the sun behind.

With her parents, she walked from the Jewish section of Amsterdam to the small building at Prinsengracht 263 and disappeared from prying Nazi eyes behind a bookcase. The bookcase hid three floors in the back section of the house -- the "secret annex" where Anne and her family, joined by four other people, would spend the next two years.

Dear Anne, It took a lot to live cooped up like that for two years in your attic.

The Germans, who overran the Netherlands in May 1940, began carting Jews away a year later. Otto Frank had planned to take his family into hiding, but hastened his plans when Anne's older sister, Margot, was told to report to a labor camp.

While the war crashed on around her, Anne's physical world shrank even while her mind kept exploring. Windows, covered with cloth or heavy slats, were rarely opened, and then only under the cover of night. Days were passed quietly, lest people in the store below hear their movements and betray them.

For the outgoing, mischievous girl just entering her teenage years, it was an excruciating passage into adulthood.

She was an avid reader and a budding writer. In her diary, she

recorded the simple joy of fresh strawberries, the petty bickering among the eight housemates, her first kiss and her terror at the possibility of discovery.

"There is nothing we can do but wait as calmly as we can until the misery comes to an end," she wrote after six months in hiding. "Jews and Christians wait, the whole earth waits; and there are many who wait for death."

Her wait ended on Aug. 4, 1944, when the hiding place was discovered. The girl who hated algebra, who dreamed of being a journalist and who clung to her belief that people are inherently good despite so much evidence to the contrary, died seven months later at Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp.

"Sometime this terrible war will be over. Surely the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews," she wrote in April 1944.

Today, the Anne Frank House is a must-see tourist stop in Amsterdam. Each year, hundreds of thousands of visitors find the narrow house on the canal, directed by the bright flags that adorn the front of the building.

In March, I visited the house for the second time in 10 years. Its message was no less troubling this time.

I wanted to linger in the upstairs rooms. I wanted to look at Anne's wall -- her paste-up pictures of movie stars and magazine cutouts -- and at the small map of Normandy where Otto Frank used pins to chart the course of the war. I wanted to look at the old stove, the sink, even the hand-painted porcelain toilet. I wanted to look at it until I understood it all, or could feel at least some glimmerings of what they felt.

Outside, I looked at the house, the canal, the nearby Westerkerk -- the 17th-century church whose bell marked time for the Frank family and where Rembrandt is buried. Everything was calm, orderly, inviting. Comfortable. Civilized. The Dutch have a word -- gezellig -- that means all those things and has become almost a national philosophy.

After only a week's immersion in the gentle flow of Dutch culture, it is a jolt to imagine the sound of German boots on the brick streets, the sight of columns marching along the quaint canals, or the smell of hate and fear that accompanied them.

Dear Anne, It is hard to believe that something as horrible as this could ever happen. It opened my eyes to the wickedness of the world.

I tried to get inside the terror that Anne felt when, after several false alarms during the two years in hiding, the Germans finally stormed into the house and up to the bookcase.

But standing at the top of the stairs behind the bookcase, I could only feel immense sadness and loss.

Dear Anne Frank, I wish I could have known you. It made me sad what happened to you. Prejudices are nasty. I wish people would stop being that way.

That night I attended a piano recital in the grand hall of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, with its lush red carpet and the names of the world's great composers etched into the walls.